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Chris Elliott is coming to pick up Dallas Video Festival's Ernie Kovacs Award

The Guy Under the Seats is coming to Dallas in two weeks. Yes, that's right. Cabin Boy himself. Chris Elliott. Son of Bob, who'd also be coming to town if he weren't 92 and not really in the mood to travel.

Father and son are being feted by the Dallas Video Festival, which will present the Elliotts with its Ernie Kovacs Award, so named for the man who created the absurdist-TV template colorized and popularized by Elliott's former boss, David Letterman. (A few years back, my old friend and former Dallas Observer colleague Matt Zoller Seitz wrote for Salon that "that signature move of David Letterman's -- suddenly 'realizing' mid-joke that a camera is observing him, then slowly walking toward it and pressing his mug right up into the lens -- is an homage to Kovacs.) The Elliotts join a prestigious list of past honorees that includes Mystery Science 3000 creator Joel Hodgson, Monty Python's Flying Circus member-turned-Great Director Terry Gilliam, Triumph the Insult Comic dog trainer Robert Smigel, Paul Reubens (otherwise known as Pee-wee Herman), Martin Mull, long-ago local Mike Judge and Harry Shearer.

Bob Elliott, of course, was one half of Bob and Ray, radio men-turned-TV comics now feted every few years in New Yorker look-backs hailing Elliott and his late partner Ray Goulding as precursors to Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Letterman, even Ali G. Wrote The New Yorker's jazz critic Whitney Balliett long ago,  "Bob & Ray invented, dreamed up the lines for, and then played, mainly on radio and television, a surrealistic Dickensian repertory company, which chastens the fools of the world with hyperbole, slapstick, parody, verbal nonsense, non sequitur, and sheer wit, all of it clean, subtle and gentle."

Chris rose to prominence ... well, from beneath the seats in Letterman's old NBC studio. And while crew members and writers came and went, Elliott was a Letterman fixture almost from start to finish; he appeared for the final time on the Late Show in February, shortly before the host's final bow.

Of course, his list of credits is estimable, from Groundhog Day to There's Something About Mary to every TV show in the past 32 years (including, maybe you forgot, Saturday Night Live). And, look, Cabin Boy might not have been very good. But Letterman was very good in it.

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Chris and his just-as-deadpan dad also starred in one of the most beloved cult show of the past 25 years: the short-lived Get a Life, in which Chris played a paperboy in his 30s still living with, well, Bob. And his first book, among many that followed, was titled Daddy's Boy: A Son's Shocking Account of Life with a Famous Father.

Josh Mills, son of Kovacs' late wife Edie Adams (herself a legend) and keeper of the Kovacs Awards, writes this about this year's honorees:

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"If anything, Ernie Kovacs is known for subverting the medium of Television. Where Kovacs style was more visual, the comedy team of Bob & Ray's humor is more understated, often deadpan. ... Think of these titans of comedy as if one was Picasso and the other Van Gogh. They both used the same canvas of Television to create something totally unique that no one had seen before. In the 1950s Eisenhower America, you didn't get more "far out" than Ernie Kovacs, Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding.

"Ironically, more than 30 years after the beginning of Television, it was Bob's son, Chris Elliott, who was the most subversive comedian on the air. ... How Kovacs-ian to literally turn the camera around, show us viewers at home that there was indeed was an in-studio audience who were part of the gag!"

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The Ernie Kovacs Award will be presented to Bob and Chris Elliott October 18 at the Angelika Film Center in Mockingbird Station. For tickets, go here.